[imtringued]

I got into programming with 12 with very little actual motivation to program anything. I read a book, did the exercises and understood pretty much everything on first try. It took me around a month to get through the book. After that I never used my programming skills until I was 16 and wanted to make Minecraft mods.

Joining IRC a modding channel and talking to Mojang devs every now and then was a pretty interesting experience.

I doubt that this is possible nowadays, especially after Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang.

My memory is failing me but I also saw Drew DeVault on IRC using his former online nick and since I pretty much used IRC exclusively for minecraft related things he must have done something related to minecraft back then as well.